Notes and Editorial Reviews

This is a hybrid Super Audio CD playable on both regular and Super Audio CD players.

R E V I E W S

The mannerist extremes of Mutter’s style make her recording of the Korngold Concerto just as persuasive as Heifetz’ arch-Romantic rendering of fifty years ago. Her husband, André Previn, conducting the London Symphony Orchestra, knows the composer’s music better than anyone. Their account of the Tchaikovsky, with the Vienna Philharmonic, is equally bracing. - Russel Platt, The New Yorker Magazine, 01/17/2005

In the sheer magnitude of her dramatic gestures, Mutter would be hard to beat in this concerto; she makes some of the soaring cantabile, which might have seemed slightly melodramatic, trulyRead more take wing. Previn creates an atmospheric backdrop for her rapt declamation in the second movement; and her reading of the finale, though perhaps not so crisp as Heifetz’s, has plenty of crunch and benefits from Previn’s bustling energy as well as his stylistic insight. Those who feel that the early promise of Mutter’s first recordings of Mozart with Herbert von Karajan (Deutsche Grammophon 429 814) hasn’t been fully realized might be surprised by her performance of Korngold’s Concerto. It might even sweep away whatever doubts the Tchaikovsky reading had raised—but even that performance should hold its own for its many moments of bracing virtuosity. The critic who chastised Korngold’s Violin Concerto as more corn than gold might have changed his mind after hearing Mutter and Previn’s musical alchemy. Recommended urgently, then, for its transfigured Korngold Concerto and simply recommended for its elemental, if occasionally, quirky Tchaikovsky Concerto. Robert Maxham, FANFARERead less